John Saul - Perfect Nightmare

The picture suddenly popped up on the screen, and Kara gazed at the image of a little girl, no more than five years old, her eyes wide with fear as she was carried to a van by an attractive woman wearing a police uniform. The little girl was crying, and Kara bit her lip as she watched. The camera cut away to a cool blonde in a well-tailored suit who was standing in front of a small house. A For Sale sign was clearly visible on the front lawn, and as the reporter spoke, Kara felt her blood running cold. “According to neighbors, Ellen Fine became afraid there was someone still in her house when she and her daughter returned to it after her agent had held an open house yesterday afternoon.”

Kara’s heart began to race and she leaned closer to the set.

“Police searched the premises, but there was no evidence of an intruder.”

No evidence of an intruder.

Just like her own house, after Lindsay disappeared.

Her hand was on the telephone before the broadcast was over. Andrew Grant’s business card, with his home number written on the back, was on her nightstand. She took a deep breath, got herself under control, and dialed. As she waited for the detective to answer, she stared at the photograph of Ellen Fine that was now on the screen. She was a pretty woman who couldn’t be more than thirty and looked vaguely familiar. But before Kara could ruminate on the woman who’d vanished, the detective answered the phone.

“Is your television on, Sergeant Grant?” she asked without preamble. “Because if it isn’t, you’d better turn it on. Channel 5.” There was silence for a moment, then she heard the detective breathe a single, quiet word.

“Shit.”

Finally, at last, she had his full attention.

Andrew Grant rang Rick Mancuso’s doorbell and hoped to God that Mancuso was going to have all the right answers to his questions. Not that it mattered — whatever Mancuso had to say, it was going to be a long Sunday afternoon. He’d wanted to put Kara Marshall and her phone call on the back burner until tomorrow morning when he’d be back in the office, but there was no way he could; not, anyway, if he wanted to sleep tonight.

So he’d put in a call to Sean O'Reilly at the Smithton Police Department, but O'Reilly was already into the disappearance up to his ears and there was nothing else for him to do but grab his gun and shield and head over to Smithton.

In the briefing, flares went off in his head when the name Rick Mancuso had come up, and he’d laid out the whole Lindsay Marshall case for O'Reilly. O'Reilly had shrugged. “I already talked to him, and I think he’s clean. But hey — if you want to lean on him, there’s no way I can stop you, is there?”

So now he was leaning against the real-estate agent’s doorbell. When Mancuso finally opened the door and he showed the agent his badge, Mancuso nodded as if he’d been expecting to see another detective and opened the door wide, inviting him in.

They sat on stools at a neat kitchen bar. For a single guy, Grant thought, Mancuso kept a tidy house. Too tidy? “So here we are again,” he began, his manner carefully amiable, at least for now. “Another open house, another abduction. Any idea why your name keeps coming up?”

Mancuso shrugged. “It’s a pretty small community. I can’t be the only guy who was in both those houses.” Grant said nothing, but kept his eyes steadily on Mancuso's, and finally the agent sat up straighter. “What do you want from me? I don’t know anything about it. When I left Ellen Fine’s house yesterday, it was all locked up. I don’t even have a key — she wouldn’t give me one. That’s why I had to ring the bell when I went back today.” His eyes narrowed truculently. “I’ve already told the other police the same thing a dozen times.”

“Did you keep a logbook from yesterday?”

“Of course. And the Smithton cops have it.”

Grant’s cell phone rang in his pocket. He fished it out, glanced at the caller ID screen, and flipped it open.

“Grant?” the caller said. “It’s Sean O'Reilly. Listen, we just found a report that there was another disappearance after an open house.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I wish I were. Happened over in Mill Creek about three weeks ago. A nineteen-year-old girl named Shannon Butler. Vanished in the middle of the night. No clues. She’s still gone — listed as a missing person. Looks like maybe we’ve got something hinky going on.”

“I’ll get back to you.” Grant closed his phone and fixed Mancuso with his hardest stare. “You ever work open houses in Mill Creek?”

Did Mancuso hesitate before he shook his head? Grant wasn’t quite sure. “Too far away,” the agent said.

“Not that far,” Grant countered. “You’ve never showed property there? Never gone to an open house there?”

Now Mancuso looked less certain. “Hey, I’m not going to say never—” he began, and Grant stood up.

“Grab a jacket,” he said. “I think we need to talk down at the station.”

The blood drained from Mancuso’s face. “Am I going to need a lawyer here?”

“Did you do something you don’t want to tell me about?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why would you need a lawyer? C'mon.”

Grant didn’t know what Mancuso had to do with all of this, but he’d bet all his years as a cop that if he dug deep enough into Shannon Butler’s file, he’d find Mancuso’s name.

M ake it stop, Ellen prayed silently. Dear God, just make it stop. But no matter how hard she prayed, the agony in her leg seemed only to grow worse. When she’d first seen what the man had done, when she’d first looked down at the raw, bleeding muscle that lay exposed where the man — the monster —had cut the small tattoo away from her thigh, she’d barely believed it could have happened at all. But as she watched blood ooze from the gaping wound and felt the pain radiate out from her thigh until it had spread through her entire body, the truth quickly sank in. It wasn’t a man who had taken her at all.

It was a maniac.

Which meant she’d have to deal with him as a maniac.

It was that realization, almost even more than the pain where he’d hacked her skin away, that made her want to simply give up, to fall back into the unconsciousness from which she’d awakened only a few hours ago.

Or was it only a few minutes?

And what did it matter anyway? Even if she fell back into the blackness, she’d only wake up again to the nightmare that was not only hers, but that of the two girls as well. So she’d forced aside the urge to escape back into unconsciousness, closed her mind to the agony in her leg, and tried to clear her head.

She was no longer in the room with the table and chairs. After he’d cut her leg — and after finishing with the hideous parody of a tea party — he’d carried and dragged her down a steep flight of stairs, through some kind of tunnel, and into a cold, dank chamber with bare mattresses on the floor and manacles chained to the walls.

A dungeon.

He manacled her wrists, then left her alone, not even bothering to replace the tape he’d torn from her lips for the “tea party.”

A few minutes later he brought Lindsay in, and manacled her as well.

He was gone longer after that, and when he returned, he carried the other girl — holding her almost tenderly — and when he put her down, she didn’t move.

Was she unconscious or—

Ellen didn’t allow herself to think it.

The monster — for that’s what she now knew he was — chained the unconscious girl as securely as he’d chained Lindsay and her.

At last, he’d finished securing the girl, taken his light up a set of wooden stairs and vanished, leaving them in absolute, claustrophobic blackness. Then all the nightmarish fears that Ellen had ever experienced came roaring back.